


What You Do Best

by InsertSthMeaningful



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Bottom Erik Lehnsherr, Charles Has Issues, Charles Xavier in a Wheelchair, Double Penetration, Dubious Consent, Erik Lehnsherr Cries His Way Through Sex, Erik Logic Is The Best Logic, Erik has Issues, Erik-centric, Eventual Smut, Everyone Has Issues, Male Genitalia on a Female Character, Mild Blood, Mild Gore, Mind Control, Multi, Poor Erik Lehnsherr, Raven Has Issues, Raven's a shapeshifter what else am I supposed to do with that, Threesome - F/M/M, Top Charles Xavier, Top Raven Darkhölme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:21:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23048470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsertSthMeaningful/pseuds/InsertSthMeaningful
Summary: Erik Lehnsherr hasn't been on The Case for long. But ever since it was transferred to him, the killings turn out more and more bizarre. And as the evidence narrows down on two particular suspects, the net draws tighter around the prey.The question is just: Who is entrapping whom?
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr/Raven | Mystique, Erik Lehnsherr/Raven | Mystique/Charles Xavier, Raven | Mystique/Charles Xavier
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21
Collections: X-Men Rare Pairs 2020





	What You Do Best

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gerec](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gerec/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [Gerec](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gerec/pseuds/Gerec) in the [xmenrarepairs20](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/xmenrarepairs20) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> Serial killer au! Either Raven & Charles as incestuous murder siblings playing cat and mouse with Detective Erik OR Erik and Charles as killers who have set their sights (and appetites) on Detective Logan! 
> 
> Didn't think I'd ever write Raven/Charles, but your prompt caught my muse's eye. It's gotten a bit out of hand, which might be because I've been watching too much Hannibal lately, but I hope you enjoy nonetheless (: (and can turn a blind eye on all the inaccuracies this most probably contains)! Also, if the smut reads awkward, that might be because it's pretty much the first one I've written out instead of letting it fade to black before the real action starts.

“Quit it with the cigar, Logan.” Emma Frost’s voice cut through the smoke-heavy air in Erik’s office. “You know it gives me a headache.”

The man in question – the sleeves of his plaid shirt rolled up to his elbows, his hair mussed from another sleepless night over their Case and one of his claws out to scratch some of the stubble from his chin – only smirked and propped his hip against Erik’s desk to take another relishing drag of his cancer stick. “Oh, sure I do, an’ you know what? I don’t give a flyin’-”

“Enough,” Erik grumbled from where he was perched over the case files. “You two are worse than cats and dogs, _you_ ’re giving me a headache.”

“You sure it ain’t the three coffees you gulped down in the last ten minutes?” Logan grunted.

“Or the seventeen bodies down in our morgue?” Emma added.

Groaning, Erik slumped forward and bumped his forehead against the surface of his oak desk. “ _Yes._ Yes, verdammt nochmal, it’s the coffee and the damn bodies in the morgue! Oh, I’m surrounded by _geniuses._ ”

“No need to get snippy,” Emma sniffled and smoothed down her pristine white skirt (which, for an FBI profiler working in the field, was actually far too short, but not one of their superiors had ever minded, and Erik didn’t really want to know the reason for that, because, well, Emma Frost had a _reputation_ ). “You could drive home instead to grab some hours of sleep before we go over the overall information again. I know you need it, and you know you need it. I can feel you dragging me down from six feet away.”

“Yeah, bub. Also, go take a shower. You reek of crime scene.”

“Seventeen men and women dead. Thirteen of them strangled or beaten to death, seven of them without a trace on their bodies, but all of them in the same setting. There’s a pattern, but no clues as to _who_ ’s established this pattern. _Why_?” Erik looked up to meet Emma’s glittering diamond eyes, artfully ignoring Logan’s butt a mere five inches to the right. “Why _me_? Why did they have to call me up to this case _at this stage_?”

“Because, sugar,” his consulting psychiatrist and profiler said and smiled a smile without mercy, “you are simply the best at what you do.”

“And what you do best, new _Agent-in-Charge_ ,” Logan, their department’s coroner, said and turned to give him a slightly – but only slightly – more empathetic grin, “is catch serial killers.”

It was lunchtime, and Erik’s favorite sandwich bar, just across the street from his department’s headquarters, was buzzing with people – some he recognized from work, some were complete strangers, as every day. And as every day, he ordered his usual: the kosher chicken sandwich, with extra lettuce, no tomatoes please. Only today he took a green tea with it, no coffee. He had had enough caffeine to last for the whole day. As it was, his bones felt like they might vibrate out of his skin if he decided to sit still for more than three minutes.

On his way to his usual place by the window, a pretty blonde with a curvy face and a broad-brimmed hat smiled at him. He didn’t smile back, only continued balancing his tea and sandwich rigidly between the other customers, because there was a man sat at her table, and he had no intention of flirting with a taken woman.

A few minutes later, he looked up from his twitter feed with the latest news about the FBI’s decision to not jeopardize hundreds of employees’ workplaces and continue training and accepting mutants in their ranks- and was met with the sight of the blonde’s partner looking right back at him.

It took only a microsecond to lower his head again and pretend he was utterly invested in the bread crumbs dusting the tabletop, but in that microsecond, Erik had noticed three things:

The man was impeccably, if maybe a bit scholarly, dressed.

The man was not looking at him like Erik had just hit on his girlfriend, or she had hit on him, but rather as if Erik was an especially intriguing specimen under his microscope.

The man’s eyes were of a blue so clear and pure that it was almost ridiculous, but most certainly a mutation.

And then, after Erik had finished his lunch and gotten up to return his cup and his plate to the waiter behind the counter, the oddest thing about the whole encounter happened.

He was just shrugging on his suit jacket while heading for the door, when he changed his route. Or rather, it felt as if his route _had been_ changed, as if someone had nudged him in another direction than he had had in mind. He was no longer making a beeline for the exit but had turned left, to make a small detour around the cluster of tables in the center of the sandwich bar’s eating area. And this new itinerary was taking him directly alongside the place where the blonde and her partner sat.

It was a disturbing sensation, to feel as if someone else had decided where his legs were taking him, where his body was angling, where his feet touched the ground. His sudden change of mind felt so unpleasant, so unnatural he almost grimaced, before he looked down and to his right and saw not one, but two pairs of blue eyes studying him with an intent he could not decipher.

The blonde woman and her partner, both smiling. Both watching him as he passed, her hand atop his, an intimate gesture. So they _were_ lovers after all. But what kinds of lovers checked out people _together_?

And then it was over. Erik reached the door, waved it open with a flicker of his powers and stepped into the hustle and bustle of the sidewalk, his legs once again his own to control. The heat of the late-spring afternoon slapped his cheeks and then the back of his head when he turned and gazed back into the sandwich bar, searching for the couple who had made his usual visit so strange, irrationally afraid they had only been a figment of his imagination.

But no, there they were, heads ducked towards each other, obviously deep in an animated conversation. Satisfied smiles graced the features of both. Just two ordinary people, a man, a woman, in love with each other. Having lunch together.

Erik shook his head and headed over the street and inside the FBI headquarters. Too much coffee, yeah, that probably was it.

Still, he casually asked Emma to scan his mind, to see if a psychic had been tampering with it. Well, it had already been some months since his latest check-up, and his headaches were getting worse, and maybe someone had somehow gotten close enough to try and keep him from solving The Case. Of course, she found nothing, as expected. Still, Erik thanked her and then proceeded to take her word that the next time she saw him with a cup of coffee after 9 AM, she wouldn’t let him drink a drop of it and if she had to wrestle him to the ground and restrain him.

With an odd look, she swore on her beloved brother’s life, and then they were off again, burying themselves in the findings of the autopsies, the reports from the crime scenes, the interviews with the relatives and friends of the victims. Seventeen of them.

For now.

“This one’s different.”

Erik nodded at Emma’s words, then took another look around the crime scene.

It was rather romantic, really. There were rose petals drifting in the water and settled between the pier’s planks, and fairy lights were strung all around the pillars of the little veranda at the very end. The table in the center of the wooden construction was set for three, with champagne flutes, a fine china set and petal-white napkins folded into swans. The candles had only recently burned down to stumps.

In the fading daylight, the scenery looked almost peaceful.

Not so peaceful did the three corpses, carefully arranged on the three cast-iron chairs, their heads facing in the wrong direction, look to Erik (or to anyone in the vicinity, really). Their empty gazes went out, towards the middle of the lake, where a single weeping willow caressed the surface of the water from its perch on a tiny island.

Swallowing, Erik approached the bodies. Emma followed close on his heels, and behind him, on the shore, Erik could hear Logan shout instructions from the open doors of his wagon. Some agents were busy putting up floodlights, and deep in his bones, Erik felt the metal structures get erected. They were familiar by now, with all the urgency necessary to attempt to solve this case, with the all-nighters their crew had had to pull lately, always out in the field. Unfortunately, nothing had yet yielded fruit.

Which meant three victims to add to the list, and maybe, but not hopefully, many more to come. Erik gritted his teeth as his eyes travelled over the careful composition – because that’s what it was, a piece of art showcasing the murderer’s, or the murderers’, talent and taste – and took it all in.

One woman, two men, barely past their twenties. All three of them dressed to the nines, as if they had been about to go out to a fancy, high-end club for the evening. Suit and tie for the male victims, a knee-length dress of silky midnight blue for the female. Rich people, then, nothing unusual about that, _all_ the victims so far had been upper class.

What was highly, extremely, _discordantly_ unusual though was the fact that-

“They’re out in the open. We’ve never had that before,” Emma voiced Erik’s thoughts aloud. “Usually, we only ever get them in closed-off rooms.”

“And all the victims so far were found a day or two after their death,” Erik added, nodding. “These bodies are… fresh.”

Emma Frost never shuddered. But judging by the way she pulled her white leather jacket tighter around her frame, she had just come very close to doing so. “Feels as though the murderers are looking over our shoulders. They can’t have come far.”

“They work in a pair, both of them seem to have their part in the fun, judging from the different methods of killing… and a designated group of possible targets. But no further clues.” A frustrated growl buried its way out of Erik’s throat. “And all the social connections! There are too many of them. It could have been anyone - a groundskeeper who worked for the different families of rich snobs, a maid, even one of the rich snobs themselves.”

The last rays of the sinking sun were finally swallowed by the horizon, only leaving the residues of daylight to dust the sky. Soon, darkness would be falling over the lands, and the floodlights would snap on with a sound like a whip connecting with flesh. Erik balked at the prospect of yet another sleepless night, its terror enhanced by the unavoidable headache the unnatural white glare of the equipment would bring on.

“Sure would make a nice painting. Romantic candlelight dinner in the evening, polyamory included.” Emma pointed to the identical wedding rings each of the bodies wore, then to the bark tied to a pole of the pier, the water making leeching sounds as it sucked at the boat’s lacquered sides. “And then, an elopement by sea. Happy end, I would say. It’s as though they wanted to tell us a story.”

“Hm. Or make a prediction. Or-” Erik stopped. Moved a few inches back, bent his neck this and that way. He had seen something. Something _something_ , a small thing, maybe he had been dreaming- No. No, there it was, clear as day.

“Erik? Found something?” A cool touch ghosted over his mind, then Emma was smiling at him, triumphant. “Oh. Good boy.”

He let the teasing slip and instead squatted down until his eyes were level with the tabletop. Or rather, one of the long, fine-stemmed glasses on it.

A frame encased in metal was approaching from behind, and then Logan’s voice rang out, gruff and grumpy. “Hey, bub. Finally found somethin’ worth our while? Or can we clear away?”

“Definitely worth our while. Logan,” Erik said and turned his head to where their coroner and part of his crew had come to a halt – faces full of expectation, hope, barely concealed weariness -, “we have a fingerprint.”

In the night following the rise of the body count to twenty, Erik had a nightmare.

Of course, with his past, nightmares weren’t uncommon. They would come out of nowhere, grasping his head with their spidery fingers, and make his eyes re-watch images and instants he would rather forget.

But there lay the issue: This nightmare was unusual. Something new. A foreign one, almost as if it wasn’t his own subconscious that had created it.

At first, it was rather pleasant actually. There was the heavy smell of roses in the air, and on his bared back, Erik could feel petals dancing in tiny roundels. The fabric beneath his chest and belly was warm, and comfy, even though it didn’t feel like anything he had ever encountered before. It almost seemed… alive.

He breathed in. Breathed out. Lowered his lids, focused on the two bodies radiating heat at his sides.

His eyes shot open at the realization that he was anything but alone. Two. There were two others with him in bed, and as he glanced first right, then left, he thought he recognized a man and a woman, both as bare as he himself felt.

What really made his blood run cold, though, was their whispers. Their tiny, delicate whispers, escaping their drowsy lips like little birds. And all despite the fact that their necks had been _twisted._

Suddenly, the smell of roses was too much. The sea of petals surrounding Erik, drowning Erik, was too much, and the slowly cooling surface on which he lay was too much, too. He choked, coughed, tried to heave himself up by his elbows.

Only to realize that his elbows were somehow… the wrong way around. And his belly too. And his feet were pointing in the wrong direction, downwards, even though he was looking at the ceiling.

When he woke with a start, he didn’t scream. Didn’t even whimper, only rubbed his hands over his face and dried them on the bedsheets when they came away wet.

What he _did_ do though, just before he laid back to maybe get two or three hours more sleep (it was barely 3 AM, and he didn’t have to get up until a quarter to seven), was put his hands against his cheekbones, his jaw, his throat. Touching, feeling, checking to make sure his head was on right.

Still, he didn’t get one more second of shut-eye that night.

It was too easy a solution. _Charles Xavier_ was too easy a solution.

And yet here they were, interviewing the man in question because he was now a suspect in The Case. Because they had found his fingerprint, barely smudged, boldly placed on a glass on the crime scene.

However, for a murder suspect, Charles Francis Xavier didn’t seem worried at all.

Armando, one of Erik’s subordinates, folded his hands to a small tent on the table and smiled pleasantly at Xavier. “So, you’re saying you were with your sister the whole afternoon on May 27th?”

“Oh yes, I do,” Xavier replied and shot his interviewer a charming smile in return. “In fact, my alibi is further strengthened by the additional presence of two dozen friends and one dozen maids attending the little party we held on that very night.”

Erik crossed his arms over his chest where he was leaning against the opposite wall of the room. Apparently, this was meant to go in no way different from all the other interviews they had had with upper-class suspects before. Then again, he should have seen it coming. After all, Charles Francis Xavier was the heir of Xavier Pharmaceuticals, headmaster of his own school specialized on the education of mutants, founder of multiple charity organizations all over the world. He could afford to be cocky.

Once again, Erik went through the further details of Xavier’s file in his head. In his thirties (almost a decade older than Erik himself), the man hadn’t had many encounters with the law. He had never been married, had only once been caught for speeding a few miles over the limit, and the worst his escapades in his youth had brought up after some digging were three cases of public indecency, all of them involving a woman named Raven Darkhölme. Then there was his accident a few years back which had put him in a wheelchair – an unfortunate stumble down the stairs, as the report went – and his weak psychic mutation with which he, as Emma had put it a bit smugly, “could influence maybe a fly on a good day.”

“You seem to have doubts?” Xavier’s voice rang through to Erik, and when he looked up, the man’s eyes quickly flitted back to Armando.

“Well,” the young officer said, “since you gave us the allowance yourself, we tapped in on some video feeds from the surveillance system on your grounds, but didn’t spot you even once in the time period between-” Quickly, he looked down to check his notes- “around three o’clock and six o’clock.”

“And that is about the time you need to kill three people and put their bodies on display in front of a lake which is a two-hour drive from my front door?” Tapping the armrests of his wheelchair, Xavier pouted, shot Erik a look from under his lashes, so that his next words seemed no more addressed at Armando. “My dear boy, in this time span, you can do much more _interesting_ things, believe me. And that’s why I didn’t get, say, a camera installed in my bedroom, or asked my guests to come to my party _wired_. I suppose someone must be trying to frame me, maybe because their girlfriend or husband preferred my company over theirs.”

Suppressing a snort at that was hard, and Erik barely scraped by. Xavier was so obviously overconfident it almost hurt, and briefly, Erik wondered if he had just been hit on. That thought was rapidly dismissed though at the prospect of wasting any more time on this seemingly useless lead, so he finally straightened up and walked over to their no-longer-a-suspect, offering his hand. “Thank you very much, Mr. Xavier, but I believe we’re finished here. We will contact you again if the need arises, but for now, you are dismissed.”

“Oh, but thank _you_ , Mr Lehnsherr. You and your team have provided quite a distraction from my daily routine, and now I have one interesting anecdote more for my lovely students.”

Emma Frost walked in the room just as Xavier was about to leave, Logan close behind, eager to share the news from the autopsy reports and further background info of the victims. Of course, Erik received them with open arms (figuratively speaking), after the minor setback they had just experienced, so he only got one more glance of Xavier when the man manoeuvred through the door Armando was holding open for him.

What he noticed made him still for barely half a second, but somewhere in a dark, dusty corner of his mind, it rang a bell. It wasn’t the fancy clothing that had caught his eyes, no, that was standard for any upper-class citizen who thought himself in any way important. It wasn’t Xavier’s soft, wavy chestnut hair either, or his skin which in the right lighting seemed almost as fair as milk.

Erik just thought that Xavier’s eyes, which had pinned him like those of a predator, hadn’t seemed so radiantly blue just a few minutes ago.

“So that makes twenty-four bodies in total,” Armando remarked and smartly scribbled something down onto his notepad. Erik doubted it was anything of actual value. They were far too much in the dark about _everything_ to gather any useful information.

“Yeah, up ‘til now, bub.” Logan took a deep whiff of the air, then exhaled through gritted teeth. “They’re mockin’ us. Whoever did that has the flamin’ balls to mock us.”

“Well, sugar-” Emma gingerly stepped over a cable leading to one of the headlights which were just being installed- “it’s not like they’re wrong.”

Erik said nothing, simply studied the arrangement in front of him. It seemed their killers had changed their tactics.

“It’s almost as if they want to be seen now,” Emma mused to his right and picked at one of her long petal-white fingernails. “Quite unlike their style before you took over The Case, Lehnsherr.”

“What? You blamin’ the poor boy now, lady?” Logan grumbled and came to a halt on Erik’s other side.

Armando looked up and over to them. “I believe she just wanted to point out an interesting fact, Mr. Howlett.”

Erik breathed in deeply through his nose, once, twice. In his belly, he could feel the first tendrils of nausea rising. _This_ was indeed interesting. Something that had never happened before.

Their team had gathered around a bandstand in the middle of a near-derelict park where usually only the drugged and the desperate sought shelter. Only that now, in their middle, four well-clad figures had seemingly met their end.

It was an orchestra. Or as close as you could get to an orchestra with a supply of four musicians. Three of them were propped up on plastic chairs of the sort you would see on the street outside a concession stand with dubious food hygiene, one was strung from the ceiling in front of them. Again, they fit the usual victims’ profile: young, rich, good-looking, as if the murderers wanted to deprive capitalism of its future. A future who played the violin, the clarinet, the kettledrum, or who led at the head of the orchestra as the conductor in the flesh.

And also, Erik observed, a future that was seemingly blind by volition.

The victims – even the conductor – were each wearing blindfolds, what looked to be the generic kind: a simple band of black, opaque silk.

“James is right. They’re mocking us,” Erik rasped out. “Four of them. Four of us, in a way. They know enough of our investigations to say that we are the four who are the most involved in it, and they know they’ve got us groping in the dark.”

“Oh,” Emma said, quietly. “ _Oh_. Then that-” She pointed at the man in the milky white suit playing the clarinet- “is probably supposed to be me.”

“Hrmpf. An’ this is me?” Logan nodded to the female holding timpani sticks over the kettledrums, three in each hand.

Darwin grinned. “At least I get the violin. Wonderfully volatile instrument.”

“They know.” Sometime in the last few minutes, his ears had started ringing. Erik pinched the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb and focused on the metal around him, in a desperate attempt to ground himself. It only barely worked. “They know who we are, they know what we can do, and their message is _klipp und klar_ : You are no match for us. Because I...” He started forward and only stopped when he was a mere three feet from the fourth victim, and he had to tilt his head up so steep it made him dizzy. “I lead you blindly.”

In front of him, the conductor hung, gently swinging from his noose. The seams on his expensive Italian suit had popped up in places, and string held his hands raised up.

His baton pointed aimlessly into nowhere.

The second nightmare came to Erik on quiet wings.

One moment, there had been nothing but blissful darkness, with the occasional glimpse of a memory ( _his mother, healthy and alive, smiling at him from over a table dusted with flour; they must have been preparing Sufganyots_ ) and the stray thought of waking up, because morning must be nearing.

The latter, Erik dismissed each time. The morning was nearing when his alarm started to blare, not one second earlier. He had had enough adrenaline pumping through his veins to last a year, so burying himself once more in his blankets and dozing off again was a well-earned path to take.

Then, suddenly, the darkness slowly receded, lifted, even though this could not be. He had the curtains drawn. His door was closed. Where was the sudden light at the fringes of his vision coming from?

And that was all it was. Light. Indiscernible shapes when he tried to focus. His eyelids wouldn’t lift, wouldn’t detach themselves from his eyeballs.

A posh voice was suddenly speaking into his ear, “Oh, will you look at him, the dear boy?” and then there was a hand under his chin, tilting it, a woman giggling on his other side and saying, “He’s so pretty, I really can’t wait.”

In his chest, his heart was thumping, like a little bird caged in between steel bars yearning to fly towards the sky beyond its reach. When he tried to move, his limbs wouldn’t respond, and when he tried to speak, his tongue would stay limp.

“Shush, dear. Calm your mind.” The man again. His fingers were warm, as if they were made out of light. Light that seared and burned and marred the skin on Erik’s jaw, and he tried to crane his neck away in vain.

The woman’s laughter cut through to him again, just before a second pair of hands touched down on his body, followed its curves down from his shoulders over his waist to his knees, and even though all was numb he _felt_ it, wanted to scream, beg her to stop, because it _hurt so much and he could not move, not even his pinkie would budge_ -

A cry was perched on his lips, ready to be released, just as his phone started to ring on his nightstand. He got up, grabbed it and had to swipe three times at the screen before it connected because his darn fingers wouldn’t stop shaking.

“Hello?” he finally rasped and pressed the device against his ear, his other hand fisted in the sheets. “Erik Lehnsherr am Telefon.”

“Well well, not a mornin’ person, are ya, bub?”

At the gruff gentleness in Logan’s voice, Erik barely managed to suppress a sigh. “Oh, it’s you. Good morning, James. Any news?”

“Great news,” Logan huffed, and for once Erik thought he could hear actual enthusiasm in the other man’s voice as he got up to fill a glass of water at the kitchen sink. “We got a new lead, an’ this time it might be somethin’ more reliable ‘n last time. You’ve met Angel, yes? Works with me, good forensic assistant, bright mind with an even brighter future ‘fore her? Well, she found a hair on the conductor’s suit, an’ it’s neither his nor one of the other victims.”

The glass creaked as Erik set it just a bit too hard back onto the countertop, but he couldn’t care less. “You mean we’ve got the killer’s DNA?”

Logan hummed. “Well… I _guess._ How’s another interview with a member of the Xavier family sound to you?”

Raven Darkhölme was a stunning woman.

And that was about as much as Erik could gather about her. Except for the escapades she had shared with Charles Xavier a few decades back, she had kept a low profile her whole life. No moving houses, no student loan debt, no remarkable international travel, no job. Not even a parking ticket. She seemed to be the direct counterpiece to Charles, living a relatively solitary life – the Xaviers’ parties the sole exception – with little to zero public appearances.

If anything, one might have thought that outside of the Xavier mansion, she didn’t exist at all.

However, the woman sat in the interrogation room was very much real. Her physical mutation, which made her stand out amidst the usual crowd like an exotic bird in an aviary of sparrows, was gorgeous, but otherwise quite useless. She had been born with blue scales over her body, which seemed to do nothing else but make her look good.

Darwin had asked her the introductory questions, and now he was coming to the ones Erik wanted answered the most.

“What is your connection to Charles Xavier?”

“We’re siblings.”

Erik almost choked on his own spit at that. What now? Public indecency, and then this? _Siblings_ , really now?

“Well,” Ms Darkhölme back-pedaled, smirking at everyone’s jaws hitting the floor, “not _siblings_ siblings, not genetically. No need to go ‘Alexa, this is so incest-y, play Sweet Home Alabama’, for sure. Charles and I just always had a special… _something_ since childhood.”

“Uh… Alright. Fine.” Even Darwin, their otherwise so impassible jack of all trades, seemed flustered, and Erik was sure that if he had the power to see through the one-way mirror to his right, he could have seen Emma Frost in the flesh trying to hide her blush behind her notepad. “Well, let’s move on then. On the day of the-”

“I have an alibi.” Ms. Darkhölme’s rich voice cut through Darwin’s question, and directly to the chase, apparently. Her indigo cheeks curled up in a grin and her eyes, yellow like those of a cat and at least twice as piercing, flickered over to Erik before focusing back on the young officer in front of her. “I was with Charles all day, in our cabin at Alkali Lake. Fishing, swimming, enjoying champagne at sundown. Anything rich kids do in their free time, you name it and can be sure we did it.”

“Do you have proof, safe for your, uh, brother’s word?” asked Darwin, posture hunched forward slightly.

And Erik was beginning to feel it, too. The impending doom of yet another cold trail.

With a confident movement of her head, Raven Darkhölme threw her neon red hair behind her ears. “I do. CCTV cameras, 24/7 surveillance, all over the cabin’s grounds. Same proof my brother got.” Again, her gaze went to meet Erik’s, and she quirked an eyebrow, her expression almost one of satisfaction. “That enough for you, inspector? I give you permission to go through the recordings of that day.”

And of course, it was enough.

All charges were dropped only seven hours after Ms. Darkhölme had walked out of the headquarters, following a thorough examination of the Xavier cabin’s vid material. No anomaly had been detected. The only thing that could have roused suspicion was the fact that the Xavier siblings (‘siblings’) had retreated into their bedroom about forty minutes before the four victims’ ToD was placed, but if they had really been involved in the murder, they couldn’t have wandered out of it about thirty minutes after, looking like they were laughing about an inside joke.

Erik and his team were back at their starting point.

If you didn’t count Alex Summers – Darwin’s fiancé who worked in the department for audio-visual material examination technology – storming into Erik’s office just as he was about to call it a night and leave to grab some few precious hours of (hopefully peaceful) sleep.

“Agent Lehnsherr,” the young, hot-headed man sporting a ruffled shock of blond hair gasped, “were you about to leave? Whew, just in the nick of time then.” And without waiting for a confirmation, he steered towards Erik’s desk and set his laptop down onto it.

Erik, who had already grabbed his fedora, remained standing in the doorway, not in the least getting what the hell was going on. At least until Summers pulled up an excerpt of the Xavier Log Cabin CCTV Recordings.

“What’s this?” Erik asked and went to bend down at the boy’s side.

The latter grinned. “New material, sir. Bet your people have so much internalized mutantphobia that you never factored in a teleporter.” He clicked on play.

At first, Erik saw nothing. It was the hall before the Xaviers’ bedroom, with the door wide open so you could see about half of it. Not a living soul around, zero movement.

And then, for about one second, a tendril of smoke curled in the bedroom, over the plush carpet, before dissipating into thin air.

“Bingo, huh?” Alex said and replayed the recording.

Quietly, Erik muttered, “Bingo.”

The next killing arrived completely unexpected and at exactly the same time as an invitation to the Xaviers’ Annual Springtime Ball: one day later. Both, it seemed, were addressed to Erik Lehnsherr, and both came in spectacular envelopes.

Erik was tired. So tired. At least he had managed to grab an Iced Americano from the lunch place across the street before taking the steps up to his office two at a time. But now here he stood, in his office, which was sealed off with police tape. His office, which he had thought would always be his safe haven, providing shelter from the storm of violence and gore raging in the outside world.

Except that now, it wasn’t any of these things. Now, it was a crime scene.

“They were like this when Sean came over because he thought I was already in?” Erik turned to Darwin. “Nobody panicked and changed anything?”

“Everything’s as it should be, boss,” Darwin mumbled.

Emma straightened up from where she perched over the female victim’s sunken form. “Mindless love.”

“Excuse me?” Erik muttered, but couldn’t tear his eyes from the scene displayed in front of him.

There were three of them. Two men, one woman. Again.

“I said, ‘mindless love’” Emma snapped at him, flicking a strand of her gold-blond hair behind her ear. “They took her brain. Sawed the top of her head right off, and took her brain. And oh, look, here’s her heart! As a _fucking paperweight_!”

Nodding felt almost surreal, like Erik couldn’t quite process what was happening but did still agree, just to look like he knew what he was doing (he did not).

There was a body in his chair. The body of a boy around his height, weight, age. To his left and right, a man and a woman knelt, their hands extended in mute worship, faces turned upwards like the heads of sunflowers would turn towards and follow the light.

“Calm down, lady. Ain’t nothin’ becoming better if you freak like this now.” Logan’s words of advice directed at Emma snapped Erik back to reality.

“We- This- There’s additional metal in all of the bodies. Too much iron, I can feel it in their bloodstreams.” He swallowed dry air, took a sip of his coffee, combed back his hair with a shaking hand.

From across the room, Angel shot him a sympathetic smile and pointed at a mark on the worshipping man’s neck. “You felt right, detective. They were injected with some kind of fluid here that must have contained the iron, shortly before their death.”

He sent a grateful nod her way before he just couldn't hold it in anymore and spat, “ _What_ is this?”

“A triple homicide,” came Darwin’s prompt, pragmatic answer.

“A fuckin’ mess,” growled Logan, less practical.

“A gift,” concluded Emma sharply. “A courtship.”

“For-” Erik didn’t want to ask the question, because he knew the answer already, had known it from the moment he had hastened down the corridor towards the three shapes so clearly distinguishable to his metal sense, but he needed to hear it from somebody else but himself to know he wasn’t going crazy- “For whom?”

Emma stared. Crossed her arms over her chest. Sagged in defeat, as much as a woman of her caliber would allow herself.

“You.”

Erik was sitting outside, in the back of an open ambulance, shock blanket and all, when a man looking quite like the Devil incarnate marched up to him and presented him with a sealed envelope.

Erik stared at the envelope. Then at the man, a mutant, judging by his appearance. Then his eyes flicked back to the envelope, uncomprehending.

“Take,” the man said in a voice heavy with a thick Russian accent and waved with the envelope in front of Erik’s face.

As if in a trance, Erik reached up and took the offered object. “Alright. Good. Thank you.”

With a smirk that closely resembled a grimace of pain, the man tipped his hat at him – now that he could study him more attentively, Erik noticed he was dressed in some kind of uniform, like that of a chauffeur for the upper class, all fine, black cotton with polished brass buttons -, then turned and walked away, down the sidewalk.

Quickly, Erik poured over the envelope. It was a thick, rich kind of paper, with his name and _only_ his name written on it in a delicate cursive. The smell of roses and jasmine welled up from it.

He looked up, maybe to shout after the curious mutant’s retreating figure or to get up sprint after him and ask him what the _hell_ was actually going on- only to see that the man had disappeared.

The sidewalk was populated only by policemen and FBI employees. No Devil incarnate in sight, not anymore.

Sighing, Erik felt the reassuring weight of the mysterious present between his fingers. At least he had proof he wasn’t going nuts.

With an inconspicuous look around to make sure he wasn’t being watched, he unsheathed the blade he had hidden in the band of his watch ever since a particularly nerve-wracking case and sliced through the creamy, strong paper. It yielded with ease.

From it, he pulled a card, of the same upper-class quality, perfumed with the same flowery bouquet. There was an invitation written on it, one for the Annual Springtime Ball of the Xavier family. It was signed _Charles Xavier & Raven Darkhölme_, by hand, with a delicate _xoxo_ placed in front of their names.

Finally. Erik closed his eyes and breathed in, deeply. A clue, a confession, from the killers themselves. _Finally_. There it was, hissing in his belly: the rage that always preceded the conclusion of a case.

He got up onto his feet so abruptly he must have scared some interns smoking nearby and chatting over what kind of crazy could have put three bodies into Agent Lehnsherr’s office. He didn’t care. All he cared about was that this was the last string. The last deadly offence in a string of deadly offences.

His vision blurring at the edges, he made for his old, rickety VW.

 _Sugar_ , came a voice in his head, cold and soothing, _have you thought this through?_

His steps unfaltering, he pulled the keys to his car from the pocket of his suit jacket, smiled grimly at where Logan was watching him with raised eyebrows from across the parking lot, and sent back, _When have I ever thought anything through? You know where to find me if I don’t come back._

 _I do._ And there she was, watching from the threshold of their headquarters, the Stepford quintuplets she had taken on as interns gathered around her like her very own guard. _Erik, I do._ A smile was playing on her lips, like the aurora borealis across the dark Northern sky, and Erik knew that as long as she kept watch over him, he would be safe.

When he reached his car door and waved it open, he could feel the adrenaline coursing through his veins. And as he sat back behind the wheel and pulled out onto the roads from which the morning fogs had barely cleared yet, he smiled.

His last hours on The Case had dawned.

“Oh, Detective Lehnsherr! What a pleasant surprise.”

Erik craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the speaker and was once again stunned into silence by the singular beauty of Raven Darkhölme.

The woman had her fire hair pinned up in an elaborate coiffure of curls and loops, exposing her long, swan-like neck and shimmering shoulders adorned with the curious indigo scales Erik had already noticed on her forehead and cheeks. Around her, the orange fabric of a wide dress swam, as if she were drowning in a sea of silk flames designed to bring out her cat’s eyes. And from her a delicate golden chain around her neck, a ruby heart dark as clotted blood hung.

“Ms Darkhölme,” Erik greeted back and decided to ignore her mistake about his status. “I am indeed glad to be here.”

“Oh, we could not _not_ invite you, Mr Lehnsherr, after all the excitement your company has brought us!” Ms Darkhölme said, smiling, and took his arm to steer him through the crowd of ladies and gentlemen assembled in the Xaviers’ entrance hall.

There were many of them. Various age groups, Erik noted, mostly upper class, a few servants among them, circling with tablets of champagne flutes and finger food. And all of them were chattering away animatedly, as though they were utterly unaware of their hosts’ murderous nature.

Or maybe they weren’t and were just relishing in their silent knowledge.

They passed a bar, where a long-haired brunet in a tux was mixing drinks for the guests, seemingly using his mutant abilities to create small whirlwinds to shake the mixer. In fact, a high percentage of the people present were mutant, as far as Erik could tell from their exterior. His insides ran cold. He had almost forgotten how well-known the male counterpart of Raven Darkhölme was for his charity to his own kind.

“Why, hello there!”

 _Speak of the devil, and he shall appear_ , a small voice uttered at the back of Erik’s head as he turned to see Charles Xavier sitting in his wheelchair by a window overlooking the extensive grounds of the mansion.

“Almost didn’t think our special guest would still be turning up. But oh, what a lovely surprise indeed.”

Faking a cordial smile, Erik thought back on the hours he had spent hunting through the city on the search of a fitting suit. Nothing he had at home had seemed quite adequate for the occasion.

Something like a knowing glint in Xavier’s eyes derailed his train of thought. “You have received our gift then, Erik?” the man asked and beckoned Ms Darkhölme closer.

“The invitation? Yes, of course,” Erik answered and wondered how they had suddenly got to first-name basis.

A chuckle that sounded suspiciously gleeful came from Ms Darkhölme, while Xavier smiled on, took one of Erik’s hands in his and said, “Oh, that, yes, of course, but I was talking about Raven and I’s little… _mise-en-scène_ symbolic of our affection to you, love.”

The excitement of the chase surged anew through Erik’s nerve system. “The… bodies in my office this morning? The declaration of admiration?”

“That one,” Raven Darkhölme confirmed, slipping an arm around his waist at the same time as her other hand began kneading her brother’s shoulder.

“You are confessing you committed these murders, and all the others before?”

“We are.” Xavier smiled and let go of Erik’s hand to take Raven’s on his shoulder, and what he said next made Erik’s blood run both cold and hot simultaneously. “Emma recommended this course of action to us since we wanted to bring you home to us as soon and as fast as possible.”

“ _Emma?_ ” Suddenly, Erik felt dizzy on his feet, like his world was being turned upside down (and in a way, he knew it was, he just so desperately didn’t want it to be true).

“Telepaths tend to know each other,” Ms Darkhölme spoke up, her eyes growing soft with fondness as they slid over Xavier’s figure. “Especially when they’ve grown up together in the clutches of high society. Oh, in fact… see that man over there?”

Feeling the control over the situation – which had been meager at best, to begin with – slipping from his grasp, Erik followed the designation of her subtly extended forefinger. It was pointed a boy, barely out of his teens, wearing a pristine white suit (and didn’t that ring a bell in Erik’s memory) and chatting amiably with what Erik supposed was his boyfriend, from the way their hands were interlinked.

“That right there, that’s Emma Frost’s younger brother Christian. They’re quite the topic in our circles, what with Emma abandoning her post at the forefront of the Frost industrial empire to her sibling so she can work for us in the FBI.”

Raven’s hand had begun squeezing Erik’s side rhythmically. He wanted to squirm, to grasp her fingers and fling them away from his body, to shout bloody murder if necessary- but something was holding him back. As if a bottlecap had been screwed too tight onto his free will.

“She also covers for fellow telepaths, of course.” Xavier was speaking again, watching out over the crowd, a serene quirk to the corner of his lips. “Such as me. Had Emma’s darling Jean not surpassed my power measurement three years ago, I would still be classified as an omega mutant.”

“But the files on you-”

“Have all been custom-tailored to my needs.” With a nod, Xavier took a flute of champagne from a waiter, sipped, then gazed up at Raven with unveiled admiration. “Raven’s too, of course.”

Erik could hear a buzz at his side, like a swarm of bees on a hot summer’s day, and as he looked over to where Ms Darkhölme was supposed to stand in all her exotic glory, an exact replica of himself met his eyes.

Finally, he found the strength to stumble away and out of her arm’s reach. “How-”

“Shapeshifter,” his mirror image said in his voice and curtsied quickly, before straightening up and turning back into Raven in front of his eyes.

“Oh my,” the woman said and looked around as if searching for someone, “what is Azazel taking so long?”

“I’ll just check in with Janos,” Xavier said while putting a finger to his temple, and then, before Erik could do or say something, Xavier’s voice spoke up in his head, _Raven, Erik, Azazel’s husband has just informed me that his beloved has stopped raiding the vodka stash for us and will be here shortly._

A puff of sulfurous smoke made Erik do a jump backwards, and then he recognized the Man-Devil who had presented him with the Xaviers’ invitation this very morning.

Tutting, Xavier pressed a feeling like ice water running down his spine into his mind and said, _Don’t let the poor man know how you think of him, yes?_

_Get OUT OF MY HEAD._

_Afraid that’s not going to happen anytime soon._ With a flourish, Xavier reached for Azazel’s hand and demanded out loud, “Take us to our bedroom, please.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Ms. Darkhölme chirped at Erik’s expression of sheer terror, “we’ll have _so much_ fun together. Trust me.”

Erik’s eyes didn’t even have time to widen before a puff of smoke enveloped them and he slipped away into the dark of unconsciousness.

Erik was dreaming.

There were voices all around, the heady scent of people, their hands and lips all over his body. Motion. Connection. Warmth.

It was a pleasant dream. Until it wasn’t.

Until Erik felt like he was dozing off _inside_ the dream, leaving it behind for even deeper sleep, and his mouth slowly but steadily filled with… _something_. It was hot, and viscid, and he could feel the iron almost as intensely as he could taste it.

He didn’t want to swallow, he did not, but then his lips wouldn’t open and there was too much fluid in his mouth, so much it began to choke him, drizzle out of his nose and over his face, and he just had to let some of it slide down his throat. It almost felt alive, whatever it was coating his insides then, sticky, nauseating. And deep down, in the last recesses of his mind, he knew he was choking on blood. 

Erik had a nightmare, and he moaned and cried.

Erik was dreaming... until he wasn't, not anymore.

The voices remained as he surfaced slowly from sleep. To his left, there was a body, warm and firm, with hands caressing his side and cheeks and a mouth that shushed and soothed him. To his right, the mattress was empty, but he could hear the clinking of glass on glass and the frizzle of champagne as it was being poured.

“Is he awake?” asked a woman, and then the mattress sank under the weight of someone sitting down at its edge.

“Not yet, not quite,” came the softly accented answer, accompanied by a hand carding insistently through Erik’s hair. “Your intuition was right once again, beloved sister. Our boy here has been broken before, and it won’t be much work to disassemble his pieces again.”

The woman gave a satisfied hum. Eyelids heavy, Erik tried to catch a glimpse of her.

“Oh.” The man, again. “I think someone might be with us again shortly.”

To calm his heart suddenly racing in his chest, Erik tried to think peaceful thoughts, like his therapist had recommended him so many years ago. _A meadow by a river. A Sabbath walk. His mother’s hands gripping his strongly, alive._

“His mind is quite unique. Maybe it’s got something to do with his mutation and how it makes him perceive the world, but it’s also entirely possible that it’s just… _him_.”

“So taken with him already?” the woman asked, a smile in her voice (on blue lips, Erik instinctively knew, even if his vision was still blurred).

“I am, and you know you are, too. Don’t lie to me,” Charles Xavier answered jokingly.

Erik tried to sit up, but he got no farther than lifting his head before he fell back onto the mattress, by all means feeling like he had been hit by a bullet train. Quietly, he moaned and tried to reconcile his (almost bittersweet) full-body ache with his presumption that he had done nothing but sleep since Azazel had teleported them here, wherever here was.

“Oh, darling,” Charles murmured, his eyes blue and all-encompassing as he leaned down to dust a kiss upon Erik’s forehead, “we took good care of you, don’t you worry.”

His throat felt like centuries-old papyrus when he finally mustered up the strength to speak. “Why do you kill?”

Raven at his side, huddled in an untied silk dressing gown, laughed and took another sip of her champagne. “Always straight to the point, our Erik! Well, we certainly _do_ enjoy taking the odd life or two.”

“However, that is by far not our only motive,” Charles added and gestured for Raven to hand over a glass of water while he helped Erik sit up against the headboard of what he found to be a bed covered in bone-white linen (which were reeking of sex, but his head wasn’t quite clear enough yet to go there). “To say we see ourselves as something of a modern Robin Hood would be hubris, but we just like to make sure that the power and capital in our circles stay where we can see and redistribute them, if necessary.”

“Emma-” Erik began only to break off when Charles pressed the cool rim of the tumbler against his lips.

“She was herding you into our net from the very beginning,” Raven took up where Charles had left off. “After all, there’s nobody better than our childhood friend to hand-pick who she thinks we could like and then recommend him first to _us_ , then to your superiors for our Case.”

“It goes without saying that we are more than satisfied by her choice.” There was a lewd quality to Xavier’s voice as he watched Erik swallow the water, toying with the fringe of the bedsheets.

A strange peace had enveloped Erik’s insides, though his very being screamed danger. He almost felt as if in trance, the small part of him that wanted to fight and flee and accuse locked away in a gloomy, damp corner of his brain. Quietly, he shivered at the thought as he finished drinking up, and then asked, “Why won’t I run away?”

“Charles has got those parts of you blocked. Mind control,” Raven remarked soberly. In the dim lighting of the bedroom, her skin almost glowed purple.

Somewhere in the back of his head, the faint impression that this should only increase his fight-or-flight response arose, but all Erik could do was watch it being squashed out like the feeble flicker of a candle. _None of that_ , Xavier whispered quietly. Out loud he said, “I built in some mechanisms which will keep you from harming us if we have not given our explicit consent, both physically and concerning our reputation. You won’t persecute us for our crimes. In fact, after you return to your normal life tomorrow morning, you won’t stay on The Case much longer, because you’ll be far too busy with your private life to care much about your work.”

Slowly, Erik nodded. “You will take care of me?” he asked, ignoring the fraction of his brain that screamed for him to stop and _think._

“We will,” Raven agreed, and when she leaned forward and kissed him and cupped his groin, he thought he could feel the sizzle of the champagne’s alcohol on her lips, and taste something even more primal.

“Hey, you two,” Charles muttered, setting aside the glass on the bedside table before he turned, gripped Erik’s thighs with surprisingly strong hands and manhandled him onto his lap, “include me in whatever it is you’re doing, won’t you.”

Raven followed Erik with a giggle, soft, warm breasts and tummy flush against Erik’s back and buttocks when she settled in and gripped him around his waist. “Ready to go again, brother dear? So soon?”

“You know the sight of you and our new darling boy always helps me with my little problem, even if it takes a bit longer than before,” Charles murmured, his hand sliding over the juncture of Erik’s hip and leg, between Erik’s thighs, spreading his cheeks. “Seems we’ve stretched him quite enough over the last few times. Do you want to have a go together?”

Mortified, with embarrassment flushing the skin from his hairline down to his hardened nipples a deep shade of red, Erik started to wriggle out of their grasp, and was promptly deterred by Raven’s hands locking around his wrists and leading them over Charles’ shoulders, so he could grip onto the headboard.

“Calm,” she whispered soothingly, then took his left earlobe into her mouth and sucked while reaching blindly for a bottle of lotion on the nightstand. Erik’s knees turned to putty instantly, and Charles had to support him with his hands on his shoulders and chest so he remained upright.

He did not want this. Not really. And still, Erik felt the intricate need to please – and to be pleased by – the Xavier siblings as they wished. So, he held still as Raven squirted lube first onto Charles’ fingers, then her own, and then they slid between his thighs together, slowly, gingerly and searching, becoming increasingly confident when he couldn’t bite back the whimpers and moans and “Sweet small noises” (as Charles called them) any more. On the headboard, his knuckles had turned white as snow, and in his belly, arousal curled like a nest of snakes.

Finally, a whisper of scales at Erik’s back told him Raven had modified something on her body. Not much, he realized when her still-blue hand travelled over his side and chest to pinch a nipple and make him gasp, but enough for something long, hard, searingly warm to press up against the sensitive juncture of his cheeks. When he looked down, he found both Charles and himself in a quite similar state, leaking pre-come at the tips.

“Ready?” Raven asked over his shoulder.

“Ready,” Charles confirmed, ever-so-slightly out of breath.

Hands steady, Raven spread Erik’s knees as far apart as they could still support him, then slid in and bottomed out in one confident plunge. His world going white and frizzled at the edges, Erik cried out.

“Hush, love,” Charles whispered so low it was almost a moan, “we’ve got you.” And this said, he took hold of Erik’s hips, pulled him down and onto himself gingerly.

Everything blurred together after that. Feeling like fainting from being so full, almost split in two, Erik could do nothing but yield to the rhythm of Raven and Charles moving; first in unison, then by turns, then simultaneously again. He couldn’t suppress the small exclamations falling from his lips, his keening, the whimpers, the moans, the pleas for mercy; couldn’t quite keep the tears from spilling that one time it almost got too much to take; couldn’t help the tormented shout and full-body spasm when he was finally allowed to come, tipping his lovers over the edge as he did so.

All the while, Raven and Charles wouldn’t stop kissing him, on his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids, the spot where his jaw and neck connected so sensitively. And their praise wouldn’t stop coming, “Good boy,” or “So sweet and pliable for us,” or “Just look at how gorgeous he is, our darling.”

And overshadowing it all were their voices in his head, their pleasure, their one single shared thought, running through their connection like a mantra.

_Ours. Ours. Yours and mine, Raven, mine and yours, Charles. Ours._

Slowly, Erik felt a similar construct taking on form in his head. He didn’t fight it, because he knew it to be the absolute truth.

Erik was _theirs._

“Why me?” was the last question he asked Charles and Raven before they kissed him goodbye in front of his dusty old VW. “Why would you chose me?”

The gray light of dawn plunged them all into a soft glow as the sun started to rise on the rosy horizon. On the gravel pathway, Raven and Charles were mere soft shapes to Erik’s eyes, looking dishevelled, tired and satisfied to their bones. In his hand, the metal of his car key sang.

He didn’t even think of a way to weaponize it for the sake of his freedom. His life had a different meaning now.

“Because you’re the best there is at what you do,” Raven finally answered with a smile, dressing gown pulled taut around her shoulders and hips.

“And what you do best, darling boy,” Charles finished when she wouldn’t, voice rasping and sweet, “is _please us_.”

**Author's Note:**

> (Oh, and that claim on your Greek Mythology AU that was dropped? That was me. My inspiration was kinda transferred to this work instead.)


End file.
